Progress Notes

The age of portrait is drugged. Beauty

is symmetry so rare it’s a mystery.

My left eye is smaller than my right,

my big mouth shows my nice teeth perfectly

aligned like Muslims in prayer.

My lips an accordion. Each sneeze

a facial thumbprint. One corner

of my mouth hangs downward when I want

to hold a guffaw hostage. Bell’s palsy perhaps

or what Mark Twain said about steamboat piloting,

that a doctor’s unable to look upon the blush

in a young beauty’s face without thinking

it could be a fever, a malar rash,

a butterfly announcing a wolf. Can I lie

facedown now as cadavers posed

on first anatomy lesson? I didn’t know mine

was a woman until three weeks later

we turned her over. Out of reverence

there was to be no untimely exposure of donors,

our patrons who were covered in patches

of scrubs-green dish towels,

and by semester’s end we were sick of all that,

tossed mega livers and mammoth hearts

into lab air and caught them. My body

was Margaret. That’s what the death certificate said

when it was released before finals. The cause

of her death? Nothing memorable,

frail old age. But the colonel on table nineteen

with an accessory spleen had put a bullet through

his temple, a final prayer. Not in entry or exit

were there skull cracks to condemn the house

of death, no shattered glass in the brain,

only a smooth tunnel of deep violet that bloomed

in concentric circles. The weekends were lonely.

He had the most beautiful muscles

of all 32 bodies that were neatly arranged,

zipped up as if a mass grave had been disinterred.

Or when unzipped and facing the ceiling

had cloth over their eyes as if they’d just been executed.

Gray silver hair, chiseled countenance,

he was sixty-seven, a veteran of more than one war.

I had come across that which will end me, ex-

tend me, at least once, without knowing it.